Busy professionals continue to rely upon voicemail services, and in particular, the message taking and playback capabilities of voicemail when they are not available to take calls directly. It is common for a busy professional to receive upwards of a dozen voicemail messages in a single day. Often, throughout the day, an individual may check phone mail as opportunity arises, and save those messages which need to be reviewed again, or acted upon later. As a result of this scenario repeated over days and weeks, the task of sifting through messages can become quite cumbersome given the potential number of saved messages which might be present within a system at any given time.
Another shortcoming of currently available systems is apparent when a user is reviewing received messages. In dynamic situations, a user may wish to listen to messages received while engaging in other tasks. For example, a user may wish to review voice messages received by the user's wireless device in situations where the user will not have the time to totally focus upon the message play feature of a wireless device, for example, a cell phone. In most current voice message playback modes, each stored message must be played back in its entirety before the next message can be accessed. This wastes a lot of time especially in situations where the user is looking for a specific message which the user is expecting to receive. Even in hard-wired phone answering systems, a user is required to hit a “Fast Forward” button in order to move to the next stored message. This requires the user's full attention to be able to manually hit “Fast Forward” at the proper time after the user has listened to enough of a message to be able to determine that the user is not presently interested in the current message and wishes to move on to the next message. In many situations, a user wishes to quickly listen to the received messages for a particular expected message and is not able to apply his or her full attention to manipulating buttons on a wireless phone or other voice message receiving device.
Thus, there is a need for an improved methodology and system for enabling improved voice message processing in electronic communication systems.